Griechenlands Platz auf der europäischen mentalen Landkarte Die Romane von Amanda Michalopoulou
Greece’ Place on the Mental Map of Europe

Summary/Abstract: By presenting the literary oeuvre of Amanda Michalopoulou over the past thirty years, we focus on the Greek-German relations in her fiction and autofiction, and more precisely the Greek self-positioning in Europe since EU accession in 1981. Her more than twenty novels and short story collections describe the political history of Greece since the 1970s and tell us the biographies of her westernized and highly mobile generation that had to process the worsening of Greek-German and Greek-European relations with the financial crisis and austerity in the 2010s. Michalopoulou avoids anti-Western and occidentalist narratives that became dominant in Greek society during the crisis and prefers to choose an inner exile in her latest novels “Baroque” and “Her Metamorphosis” by retreating from real time and space and performing formalist or surrealist experiments. This way, Michalopoulou is producing “glocalized” literature addressing key topics of modernity such as identity, gender issues or fiction vs. reality – while keeping a recognizable Greek cultural grounding of her plots.

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